Whenever I watch a classic movie with one of the stars of yore, Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, John Wayne, Bette Davis (once she had entered her thirties), I notice how few of them were handsome in the classic sense. Clark Gable was kind of the exception that proved the rule. But, the striking John Gavin never made it big.

Nor have other lookers, female as well as male. Paul Walker is nice to look at, but outside of the Fast and the Furious films, he hasn’t really been able to pack audiences in.  It’s not good looks which determine how much box office a star can bank.  It’s something else, something that no one can really put their finger on, but everyone kind of knows it when they see it, that “it” that makes a movie star.

At a party Saturday night, celebrating the release of the most enjoyable Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, this issue was raised in a conversation amongst a clique of conservative cinephiles. We all agreed that Sandra Bullock had it. And while an attractive woman (at least according to my straight friends contend) she’s not a Jessica (Alba, Biel or Simpson). Her breakthrough picture, Speed, came out the year she turned 30, supposedly past her prime for a Hollywood starlet.

Playing a middle-aged mother, she is carrying the Blind Side toward a quarter-of-a-billion dollar domestic box office, the eighth highest grossing film of 2009.  Still, while a good actress, very good in this movie, she does not rise to the level of Meryl Streep, Laura Linney, Alfre Woodard or Kathy Bates.

That said, she has something which turns mediocre scripts like that for Two Weeks Notice into most enjoyable movies.  And even in movies with, well, unsalvagable stories, like All About Steve, it takes you a while to realize just how bad the movie is, because, well, she commands your attention.

Nine years ago, in reviewing Moulin Rogue!, Owen Glieberman came closest to defining that “it” that everyone in Hollywood wishes they cold reduce to a formula:  ”As the courtesan Satine, Nicole Kidman has an accomplished whiplash-dominatrix style but not, perhaps, the eccentric dynamism of a true star.”  Eccentric dynamism, yeah that’s it, but what exactly is “eccentric dynamism”?

UPDATE:  An actress friend offers this insight on Miss Bullock:

She is approachable and likeable. Woman see her as not-too-pretty, friendly, real and someone you could go out and gossip/hang with and yet she seems to have just enough sex appeal for the guys. It’s hard to find that combo. She also is very funny and laughs at herself. She hits the right notes for both sexes to enjoy her. I think she allows her personality to come thru her performances which helps to make her successful.

Hm.. I thought the eeeevil torture advocate was supposed to be against us.

Oh that’s right, he’s got a long history of supporting homosexuals (including his daughter). One wonders whenever this great man will get any sort of credit or respect from the gay “community”. Probably the day after its leadership is wrested away from the angry Leftist mob currently in charge. Dream on, huh?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

For doing the right thing, the Garden State’s Chief Executive is sure to face the wrath of those who believe government knows best:

As politicians spend America into the fiscal abyss, Republican Gov. Chris Christie has a novel idea: Freeze spending. For such statesmanship, watch him be demonized like no one before.

In his first inaugural, President Reagan noted the spending constraints that individuals face and asked, “Why then should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?” And in the most famous line from that speech: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

New Jersey’s new governor, the successor of so many corrupt chief executives, is taking action that will make him, like Reagan, the focus of pure hate from those who think what taxpayers earn is Monopoly money to be treated according to the whims and desires of politicians, bureaucrats, union bosses and other power players.

Stand tall, Governor, we bloggers have got your back.

(H/t:  Jennifer Rubin.)

Let’s explore the law of unintended consequences.  The monstrous Obamacare National Healthcare Takeover wasn’t the only casualty of US Sen. Scott Brown’s (R-MA) election.  The dropping out of Patrick Kennedy is another obvious one, sure.  And I’m also positive there will be many Democrats running into the arms of retirement who would not have before Brown’s election.

But think about this one:  Scott Brown may have saved New York City from having the 9/11 KSM Show Trial held in their backyard.  Why?  Well, before Brown’s election, there were only scant peeps — mostly Republicans — opposing the Obama-Holder plan to showcase KSM & Co. in Manhattan.

SINCE Scott Brown’s election, the roar of disapproval about the 9/11 trials has become so loud that Obama himself has capped Holder at the knees.  Media reports now say a military trial is likely, perhaps even held at GITMO.

Elections have consequences, my friends.  Sen. Scott Brown’s is the gift that keeps on giving back to America every single day.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Last night, I again watched a clip of Joy Behar telling us that gay men don’t take monogamy as seriously as straights.  This time, however, I noted that Whoopi Goldberg rose to our defense, saying “not with the gay folks I know.”  (When I watched this last month, I saw a shorter clip* than the one I discovered last night on Towleroad–full clip below the jump.)

Yea, Miss Behar has a point that monogamy is harder for men than it is for women, but she could at least have allowed that if straight can learn not to stray, so too can gay men.  Indeed, the Oscar-winning actress countered the left-wing talker, saying her gay friends are “not happy” if their partners fool around.  They have learned to tie their sexual drive to emotional connection.

Kudos to Whoopi for standing up for gay men.

With Whoopi’s words in mind, this single man wishes all his coupled friends a Happy Valentine’s Day and invites you to use our comments section to share your stories with us–how did you meet your “schweetie”? (more…)

The immediate past Vice President of the United States has been very much in the news this weekend, supporting repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, praising the President’s “decision to send more troops” to Afghanistan, tearing into his successor.  That good man has been keeping a high profile of late.  At the same time, the woman who followed him as his party’s choice for the second highest office in the land has also drawn much media attention.

So, once did Mr. Cheney’s predecessor, Al Gore.  That Democrat seemed eager to hog the limelight, offering apocalyptic warmings, er, warNings about the threat of global warming.  Now, he seems to have vanished.  Maybe he’s hibernating.  Must be that cold winter back east.

Wonder if his disappearance has anything to do with this headline: World may not be warming, say scientists.

Do hope gay leaders/activists acknowledge this good man for saying so in a public forum After all, as Vice President, he earned little praise for distinguishing himself from then-President George W. Bush on the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Appearing on ABC’s “This Week”,

[f]ormer Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, expressed support for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which President Barack Obama has asked Congress to work on this year.

“Society has moved on,”  he said.  Pointing out that Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff favors repeal, he said he’s “reluctant to second guess military in this regard,” Cheney said

the first requirement you have to look at all the time whether [military units are] capable of achieving their mission and does the policy change, i.e., putting gays in the force, affect the ability to perform their mission.  When the chiefs come forward and say we think we can do it, then it’s strikes me that it’s time to reconsider the policy.

Nice to see that he frames the issue exactly as it should be framed–one of military effectiveness.  Let’s hope more people take note of Cheney’s position on the issue.

UPDATE:  (Somewhat related):  ”Cheney ‘a complete supporter’ of Obama Afghanistan Strategy.”

Guess companies across the globe must have succeeding in curbing carbon emissions, so, kudos particularly to the Chinese and Indians for growing their economies without increasing their carbon output.

Professor Phil Jones, “whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change . . ., said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.”  Apparently, Mr. Jones organizational skills are lacking–and he has had trouble keeping track of his data:

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

UPDATE: Commenting on a line in the article about how this impacts the global warming debate, “The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made”, Althouse offers:

Everyone should perceive flaws! To talk about “sceptics” as the ones who will “seize” upon “evidence” of flaws is unwittingly to make global warming into a matter of religion and not science. It’s not the skeptics who look bad. “Seize” sounds willful, but science should motivate us to grab at evidence. It’s the nonskeptics who look bad.

Read the whole thing.  Dunno that I agree with Ann’s interpretation here, but, as usual, she does create food for thought.

Unlike many in the mainstream media, we bloggers don’t have fact-checkers or proofreaders to point out potential errors in our posts or to catch typographical mistakes.  We very often depend on our readers to catch mistakes we may have missed.  And owe it to them and our readers to fix them as soon as we are made aware of them.

I did just that yesterday when a reader, indeed, one of the subjects of the post, informed me that I had misrepresented his views.  I corrected a post after I became aware of my error.  Later, I decided to pull the post, being only the third time I have done such a thing since I started blogging. 

On a day when I was trying to post as quickly as possible so I could provide fresh material for you all, I quickly typed up a post, summarizing a piece from Newsbusters that a reader had e-mailed to me, offering my own spin.  That piece inaccurately reported comments Michelangelo Signorile had made on Joy Behar’s talk show.

Shortly after I posted the piece, Signorile contacted me, informing me of my error and asked me to watch the clip.  (Interestingly, he did not ask me to correct or pull the post.)  He was right that I should have watched the clip before I posted the piece.  Because I find Newsbusters normally to be reliable, I didn’t watch the clip, primarily because I had wanted to save time yesterday.

My error ended up costing me time.  After watching the clip, I updated the post to correct my error, perhaps devoting more time to writing the correction than I did to composing the original post.  

As I was returning home last night, however, I realized that had I watched the clip, I wouldn’t have written the post in the first place.  It thus struck me that I should probably pull the post I had recently corrected.  Given that readers had already commented, I thought I’d keep it up and write this post.  

But, as I began writing this post, I listened to my gut and decided to pull it.

(more…)

Okay, So I’ll admit, I’ve been bad about blogging for, oh, about a year. So I’m in no position to start bossing other (and much more skilled) bloggers around.

But this one is crying out for a Caption This!

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

Welcome Instapundit Readers!!

In an editorial today (via Instapundit), the editors of the New York Post lavish praise on the Garden State’s Republican Governor for “doing what he was elected to do — getting the budget under control, without reflexively raising taxes.”  In so doing, he becomes a model for chief executives of other states (and one federal government) in similar fiscal straits.

Chris Christie is making cuts across the board and “has let it be known that he’ll stick to his campaign promises and oppose any gas-tax hike.”  Good for him, the problem is not that governments have been taking in too little money, but that they have been spending too much.

Given the squeals of protests for Democrats and special interest groups, it’s important that folks who understand that governments, like homeowners, must live within their means, stand up and defend this good man.  Perhaps, Tea Party activists in New Jersey could rally on behalf on the aggressive executive, with signs, saying, “We’re with you, Chris,” “We support your plans to hold the line on spending,” or some such.

For now, I’ll just repeat praise from a prior post, Kudos, Governor.  I’m proud to call myself a member of your party.  And commend you for standing strong against special interests and for fiscal discipline.

It was heartbreaking to watch the Georgian athletes walk into the Olympic Stadium.  Every other nation was cheering, jumping up and down and soaking in the excitement.  But the Georgians were in mourning for the loss of their comrade-in-sports, Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died yesterday morning in a training run on the luge course.

I just wanted to take a moment to express my sorrow to all those who knew Nodar and his family.  And condolences to all those Olympians who were struck by the tragedy yesterday.

It is sad that the World had to come together last night under a cloud of darkness, but I was cheered by how brave the Georgian delegation was as they strode into the stadium with 60,000 people encouraging them to continue on with their dreams.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As Glenn Reynolds might say, they told me if I voted for McCain that the government would become Big Brother and listen in on my phone conversations.

THEY WERE RIGHT!

[T]he Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls. Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department’s request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans’ privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed.

What fools the liberals are to have thought Obama was anything more than a smooth talking statist.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Hilarious….

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

You be the judge….

“He says ‘I’m for clean coal,’ and then he says it in his speeches, but he doesn’t say it in here,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. “And he doesn’t say it in the minds of my own people. And he’s beginning to not be believable to me.”

Hopeandchange!  Hopeandchange!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Today marks the 201st anniversary of the birth of the greatest Republican president in American history.  While George Washington’s leadership ensured that our nation survived its birth pangs, Lincoln held it together when it faced its most difficult crisis since its inception.  As James M. McPherson wrote in Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief: “Not only Lincoln’s success or failure as president but also the very survival of the United States depended on how he performed his duties as commander in chief.”

It is impossible in the short space of a blog post to detail Lincoln’s many accomplishments.  And while that great men delivered a number of memorable speeches and offered numerous clever quips, he was also a great decision maker and story-teller.  It seems a lot of great Americans had that in common.  Benjamin Franklin and Ronald Reagan also loved to spin a yarn to entertain their audiences or to illustrate a point.

Let us today remember this man for his cool head during our nation’s most challenging crisis.  He acted slowly, deliberately, guided by a set of principles rooted in Scripture and the American tradition.  He performed masterfully a commander in chief.

May he always serve as an inspiration to all of us–and our nation.

A very good lesbian friend of mine alerted me to an article proving that my affection for my nieces and nephews is natural:

A new study found that homosexual men may be predisposed to nurture their nieces and nephews as a way of helping to ensure their own genes get passed down to the next generation.

Weird that she should send this on the day before I set to spend a day with an “adoptive” niece at Disneyland.  Will make the day more enjoyable knowing that I’m only doing what comes naturally.  (Memo to self:  stop at ATM to get extra cash to make sure ice cream fund is fully replenished.)

Evolutionary psychologist Paul Vasey of the University of Lethbridge in Canada studied “group of men called fa’afafine on the Pacific island of Samoa.”  The fa’afafine are exclusively attracted to men:

The researchers surveyed about 300 fa’afafine, and found that they were significantly more likely to be altruistic toward their nieces and nephews than either single men or women, or mothers or fathers. The scientists call this behavior avuncular, or uncle-like.

Yeah, that sounds right.

And I just thought I was a nice guy.  Turns out it’s just my inherent avuncular abilities.

This is going to make Disneyland a whole lot more fun today, knowing my altruism is instinctual.

I always thought a campaign promise was kind of like a candidate’s contract with the voters. He promises us he’ll do this to win our votes.  We vote for him expecting him to fulfill the obligations he agreed to in his bid for office. Ed Driscoll reminds us of this pledge Democratic candidate Barack Obama made on the campaign trail:

On Tuesday, “President Barack Obama said he is ‘agnostic’ about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.”  Agnostic about a firm pledge made during his campaign?   That’s a pretty quick turnaround.

Guess he doesn’t have the guts to stand up to special interests and cut spending.

* (more…)

While one politician in New Jersey may be getting the message, politicians in Washington remain clueless about the fiscal mess they face.  Or what they need do to increase the number of jobs in this great country. A bipartisan groups of Senators has proposed a jobs bill that shows little understanding of the private sector.  (If that’s what bipartisanship is, I don’t want any.)

The Baucus-Grassley extends payroll tax exemptions to employers hiring someone who has been unemployed for more than 60 days while granting at $1,000 tax credit for new hires who stay on the job for 52 weeks.

Based on his experience in the private sector, Hugh Hewitt believes there “is no way these ‘incentives’ will create many real jobs, though they will lower the cost of workers who would be hired anyway by expanding businesses.” The talk show host/blogger has a better idea:

If the Congress would simply order water deliveries in California’s Central Valley or rewrite the absurd Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act of 2008 or any of a dozen other common sense measures to increase economic activity, the jobs outlook would be much better off than with this election year posturing.

Simply put, we need eliminate regulations that make it difficult for entrepreneurs to do business. Methinks though that the White House doesn’t much care for elimination of anything which might reduce the power of the federal government. No wonder “small businesses are less than impressed with the administration’s latest plans to create more jobs.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may well be trying to scrap Baucus-Grassley, but I doubt he’ll replace it with regulatory relief.Effe

New Jersey’s Governor is doing to his state budget what the president should be doing to the federal government:   freezing spending.  And unlike the Democrat’s proposed freeze, the Republican is not waiting until he has increased funding to various pet programs he’s trimming spending right away:

Calling New Jersey’s budget a “shambles,” Gov. Chris Christie announced Thursday he is immediately freezing all state spending.

Saying New Jersey is on the verge of bankruptcy, Christie declared a fiscal emergency, announcing drastic cuts. Among them, aid to school districts that have excess surpluses.

“Today we are going to act swiftly to fix problems too long ignored. Today I begin to do what I promised the people of New Jersey I would do,” Christie said.

Wonder if Christie is blaming his big-spending predecessor for the fiscal mess he inherited.  We’re hearing squeals of protest from the typical suspects.  Democrats and liberal special interest groups are outraged, but taxpayer groups are pleased.  It sounds like the Governor has only just begun; he plans to revisit union contracts for the state’s public transportation system.  Let’s hope those are they only union contracts he’s looking into.

This freshman Governor is showing the way Republicans need to act if they want to restore the faith of the American people and return to sound fiscal policies, but they need also brace themselves for attacks in the media and from special interests.  Doing the right thing won’t endear you to everyone, least of all those used to sucking a the government teat.

Looks like this Republican is keeping his promise to pick the state capital up and turn it upside down.  Kudos, Governor.  You’re a credit to your party–and your state.